Suchergebnisse

Greater uncertainty characterizes Australia's strategic environment. Power transitions in the Indo-Pacific test US primacy at a time when Australia as a major US alliance partner is encountering new asymmetric, society-centric threats from state and non-state actors in what is called the 'cognitive battlespace'. This is a different kind of warfare, utilizing information as military force. Threats take the form of direct manipulation of interconnected, information-rich environments. Securing the national interest from society-centric threats involving the 'weaponization of information', especially of social media and the global corporate platforms upon which they operate, poses considerable strategic, conceptual and technological challenges for Australia's civilian and military cyber-defence agencies. We begin by briefly reviewing the evolution of the strategic culture underpinning Australia's understanding and use of military force, arguing that it is shaped largely by historical insecurity borne from a deeply embedded social sense of isolation and an unquestioned strategic imperative to rely on alliances with 'great and powerful friends'. We give a brief account of Australia's 'last wars' which saw it deploy to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and note the evolving cyber-enabled changes to the battlefield. We then argue that the new cyber-threats target the domestic fabric of liberal democracies and market economies, posing risks to all military and civilian institutions as well as weakening citizens' belief in the values which underpin them. Finally, we examine Australia's evolving integration with US networked cyber capabilities, and legislative and bureaucratic reforms to counter foreign political interference campaigns, asking whether they are sufficient.

Abstract
Infrastructural power in the United States, which is the capacity to extract and deploy social resources and initiate and harness technological innovation, is increasingly generated by private internet capital and exercised by digital platforms. In this article we argue that while these private actors do not possess legitimacy, this is a form of 'virtual sovereignty' which complicates the capacity of the US state to exercise infrastructural power. Though internet software was designed largely by US corporations, commercial users operate increasingly in deterritorialized global spaces, where citizen consent and the interests of the US state are not business priorities. Moreover, much of the internet's hardware is financed by private internet capital within global wealth chains and digital spaces populated by US and non-US corporations. We argue that digital platforms acquire infrastructural power through the accumulation and commercialization of big data, from which they curate individual thinking and behaviour. We point to the targeting of US liberal democratic resilience by hostile, domestic and foreign actors weaponizing social media, and the potential ramifications of the exercise of virtual sovereignty for the return of great power rivalry in international relations. The article concludes that private internet capital's command of vast socio-economic resources reinforces the digital platforms' leadership in technological innovation and challenges the sovereign state's monopoly over national security.